The Erasure of Amour-Propre: The Case of Rawls

• In Event: Inequality in the Enlightenment: New Work on the “Jealousy of Trade”

Abstract

The work of Istvan Hont helped restore the concept of amour-propre to a central place in our understanding of the history of modern social thought. Yet the fact that this restoration was necessary raises the question of how amour-propre dropped out of our conceptual vocabulary in the first place. In this paper I examine the process in microcosm through a single case study, the intellectual trajectory of John Rawls. In his undergraduate thesis in theological ethics, the young Rawls offered a fierce moral critique of what he called "egotism," the sin of pride manifest in the desire for superiority over the other. By A Theory of Justice three decades later, "egotism" has been recast as the more innocuous "envy," and its absence is now assumed as one of the foundational assumptions of the original position. Yet traces of Rawls's original critique remain visible, albeit submerged beneath a new set of philosophical and social-scientific assumptions. In this sense the case of Rawls might indicate the broader ways in which the erasure of amour-propre was far from a simple or straightforward process.

Author

• Daniel Luban, Columbia University